Medical knowledge integration and "systems medicine": Needs, ambitions, limitations and options.

Abstract:

:Medicine today is an extremely heterogeneous field of knowledge, based on clinical observations and action knowledge and on data from the biological, behavioral and social sciences. We hypothesize at first that medicine suffers from a disciplinary hyper-diversity compared to the level of conceptual interdisciplinary integration. With the claim to "understand" and cure diseases, currently with the label "Systems Medicine" new forms of molecular medicine promise a general new bottom-up directed precise, personalized, predictive, preventive, translational, participatory, etc. medicine. Our second hypothesis rejects this claim because of conceptual, methodological and theoretical weaknesses. In contrary, this is our third hypothesis; we suggest that top-down organismic systems medicine, related to general system theory, opens better options for an integrative scientific understanding of processes of health and disease.

journal_name

Med Hypotheses

journal_title

Medical hypotheses

authors

Tretter F,Löffler-Stastka H

doi

10.1016/j.mehy.2019.109386

subject

Has Abstract

pub_date

2019-12-01 00:00:00

pages

109386

eissn

0306-9877

issn

1532-2777

pii

S0306-9877(19)30776-5

journal_volume

133

pub_type

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